When we went camping when I was a kid, my Mom used to say the same things over and over again.  Anyone born before 1980 probably doesn’t know what this idiom means, but she “sounded like a broken record.”  For the benefit of the young, when an LP would get a scratch, it would “skip” and it would “skip”, and it would “skip”, and it would “skip”, and it would scrrrtch repeat the phrase, repeat the phrase, repeat the phrase, repeat the phrase scrrrtch until you would bump the needle arm lightly with your finger to move it past the scratch, “scrrrtch,” and it would continue on unless of course it hit another scratch, hit another scratch, hit another scratch, hit another scratch scrrrtch…

Dad came up with the idea of numbering Mom’s frequent phrases.  Here, for you reading pleasure, straight from a camping journal circa 1967, are some examples:

#59 – “Mary, did you go to the bathroom?”  Apparently I was one of those kids who would forget to go until we were ten minutes into our day excursion, at which point I would need a bathroom.  Now.  I think Andy inherited that from me.

#22 – “Where could you get a meal like this?”  Anyone who camps knows what this means.  Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Potato Buds and Oscar Meyer Wieners taste like a White House state dinner when you’re camping.  Something about the outdoors.  Mom said that one a lot – almost every night I think.  Maybe what she really meant was “Really, I should just cook this at home most nights, don’t you agree?”

#17 – “The sun burns at these high altitudes.”  We usually went to the Grand Tetons on our camping trips.  Mom would remind us frequently of the danger of sunburn because it was usually so cool.  I grew up and forgot; when Al and I took a canoe out on Jackson Lake on our honeymoon trip to our new home in San Francisco, we got to take a photo of my fire red back with SOS written on it in aloe cream.  Ouch.  #17 indeed.

and finally:

#20 – “Let’s get organized.”  Mom was and is nothing if not an organized person.  I am not so organized although I long to be so.   I often say in my head “I need to get organized” but struggle to actually accomplish it.  It has to do with procrastination more than anything else.

Now I am facing 2011 with many new pursuits and I’m getting a little nervous at the prospect.  I need to get a schedule.  I need to keep to it.  I need to make to do lists, check them twice, put them in appropriate folders, mark them on one calendar and one calendar ONLY.  I need to find out the library hours, the gym hours, then  fit them in around the online classes, the chorus rehearsals, the designated quilting nights with Terri, the meditation time, the undisturbed reading time and damn-it-all, the work time.  I really hate sleep, but I keep reading everywhere that people who sleep less than 5.5 hours a night have more trouble losing weight and more danger of dementia.  Which means I have to quit this hate relationship I have with sleep and this love relationship I have with caffeine, or be doomed to be stuck in a chair, unable to get up and not knowing why I really need to.

I am going to start tonight, as soon as I finish this little diatribe, by categorizing my blog entries.  So far most of them are in “uncategorized” which is not helpful for the future when I might want to remember what I wrote and use it for something else.

I shall leave you with this.  On one of our trips  we saw a ranger talk on how mountain meadows are always in the process of turning into lakes, and vice versa.  Thereafter, whenever Mom saw a swamp in our alpine travels, she would muse “I wonder if that is a meadow turning into a lake or a lake turning into a meadow?”  That earned the spot of #1 in our Mom’s sayings catalog.  As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, I may have to change the title of this blog to My Second Favorite Philosopher.  You have to admit, that #1 is about as philosophical as you can get and she would have to be, without a doubt, my favorite philosopher!

Now I’m off to #20…